I'm actually not sure who bloggy and Tyler Green are taking sides with in the Jack Pierson vs Barneys dustup. Barneys supposedly "forged," for its window displays, its own set of Pierson's "trademark" sculptures made out of found sign letters. Pierson is mad, and his gallery Cheim & Read wrote a pedantic letter to the clothier that stops short of asserting an actual intellectual property right but nevertheless accuses the retailer of a "fraudulent situation."

But given that those kinds of sculptures are commonplace--you see them in craft fairs, regional art shows, and T.G.I. Friday's-calibre restaurants--that's a bit like Duchamp writing an indignant letter to a urinal manufacturer. As long as the accusations of "fraud" are flying around, why doesn't Pierson have his gallery write an outraged screed to the stock photography company selling this royalty free image:

Or maybe sling a fraud allegation at painter
Leslie Brack while he's at it?

“MTAA has made the final four as a number 11 seed! Your success was modeled/is hitched on George Mason University’s in the NCAA tourney. I will be posting an updated bracket soon! Guess you better start rooting for the Patriots to win it all.”

twhid adds:
I have had zero (or, more likely, negative) interest in this so-called March madness… until now! Go George Mason!

Become a Target of Heightened Surveillance

The design of the headdress borrows from Islamic and Hindu fashion to comment on the racial profiling of Arab and Arab-looking citizens that occurred post-9/11. The design of the headdress is thus a contradiction: while its goal is to hide the wearer, it makes the wearer a target of heightened surveillance.

The laser tikka (forehead ornament) is attached to a hooded vest and reflective shawl. The laser is activated by pressing a button on the left shoulder of the vest. When pointed directly into a camera lens, the laser creates a burst of light masking the wearer

Powered by OpenTV set-top software, the mosaic and interactive elements, offered on channel 100, follow some earlier work with the technology by EchoStar. In 2004, the DBS service provider offered mosaics to support the Summer Olympics and for coverage of the Presidential elections.

A mosaic thumbnail, once selected by a customer, will be transitioned to full-screen video.

Cable has a technological advantage over satellite because signals can be sent two ways. Without a two-way path, satellite operators can offer simultaneous viewing of channels or provide VOD via cable PVR boxes. Programming can be downloaded and stored for later retrieval. That's what DVB-H does, too.

How long until WiFi, WiMax or DVB-H deliver multi-media for Playstation Portables? You decide.

Media Matters' automated system to preserve and digitize priceless collection

The University of Georgia’s Peabody Archives has signed with Media Matters to use their System for the Automated Migration of Media Archives, or SAMMA, to migrate over 2,000 recordings submitted by local television stations around the United States for consideration in the annual Peabody Awards competition between 1973 and 1990. The project, funded by the National Park Service’s “Save America’s Treasures

Today is officially my last day at Rhizome, so I wanted to send out a quick note and officially bid farewell. Actually, this isn't so much a farewell, since I'll still be around, just as another member. The only difference, really, will be that you will all have to put up with my miscellaneous ramblings, without the benefit of me actually writing code for you. ("Oh, great", I can hear some of you thinking.)

Patrick May has been in the office since February, and the transition has gone better than I could've hoped. He'll be in touch with y'all soon, but let me just say that he's hit the ground running and already has a batch of fresh new ideas to improve the user experience at Rhizome.

Patrick, Lauren, and Marisa make a phenomenal team, and it's going to be a kick to stand back and watch where they take Rhizome in the future. I'm happy to be moving on, but I have to admit I will miss working with and for the other folks on staff.

I will also miss working with the Rhizome community, many of whom I've had the privilege of getting to know well over the last three- and-a-half years. I've enjoyed having so many people to learn from as the field has continued to grow. And although some of our discussion about Rhizome policy has been, mm, how you say, contentious, I always kept in mind that it is mostly driven by the desire to see Rhizome, and the entire field of new media arts, succeed. Without its opinionated users, Rhizome wouldn't be what it is today, so thanks to all of you.

As for my plans in the near future: Still unfixed, and right this minute I suppose I like it that way. I'm actually going to be vacationing a bit next month, with old friends to visit in Barcelona, a friend's wedding in Minneapolis, and then quality time with my family in Washington State. After that, who's to say? I'll be sure to keep y'all posted, in between posting here about hallucinogenics and XML and everything in between.

Last November, I notified the Rhizome community that I would soon be stepping down as Rhizome's Director of Technology. Today, I'm very happy to announce that our next Director of Technology will be Patrick May.

Patrick comes to Rhizome with an exceptional background in both technology and in the arts. His previous position at the publishing company Source Media gives him extensive experience with developing and maintaining large, content-driven sites with limited resources, and this experience will come in handy at a highly dynamic, community-oriented website like Rhizome. He is also active in the free software and Ruby communities: He is the creator of the Ruby-Web library, and has presented at the International Ruby Conference.

Patrick is also the cofounder and Director of Programming at the Williamsburg-based artists' collective Open Ground, helping to guide the consensus-based curatorial process that furnished Grand Street with four years' worth of always surprising group shows. He is an artist himself, and his creative practice incorporates a software library he created that automatically publishes consecutive iterations of images to an artists' blog; he discussed this tool at Rhizome's second "Blogging and the Arts" panel discussion.

Being Rhizome's Director of Technology, of course, requires more than just a knowledge of programming, and more than a familiarity with new media arts. Rhizome has always been an undersized organization with oversized ambitions, and we continue to explore ways to deepen the nascent connections between art and technology. Patrick's resume hits a lot of the right topics, but what's most important is that he's able to think of the big picture--not just in terms of artworks and lines of code, but also in terms of organizations and communities. I'm confident that he will make the perfect partner for Lauren and Marisa as the three of them lead Rhizome in the future. We've accomplished a lot in the last year, and I'm excited to see what changes will come in the years ahead.

We are expecting the transition process to work like this: Patrick will come in on February 2nd, and he and I will work side-by-side throughout February as I train him in. My last day will be March 3rd, but even after then I'll still be available to Patrick & the organization in general.

I'm quite happy to leave this job in Patrick's capable hands. I hope you all welcome him as kindly as you welcomed me.

> I have long been appalled by the way that theorists supposedly steeped > in> psychoanalytic readings could misdefine schizophrenia and then> consistently glamorize this very serious, very misdefined condition as> some sexy alternative to 'reality.' There is a long list of scholars> who've become quite famous in the course of building and upholding this> farce.>> Now I'm all for creativity, metaphor, and wordplay, but I feel that > any of> us with a ligitimate interest in these discourses or in contributing to> any kind of meaningful conversation have a personal responsibility not > to> entrench this kind of grossly irresponsible scholarship.

Good thing Rhizome doesn't try to have an official stance on psychiatry ;)

I'm not familiar with D&G's writings on psychiatry, but it's quite possible to be critical of mainline psychiatry without necessarily glamorizing the condition of schizophrenia. A lot of the good "anti-psychiatry" theory moves to put such conditions out of the individual context, and into the social context, which was part of psychiatry's brief in the beginning but has been slowly leached out of the practice as it became more closely lashed to modern technocratic society.

I agree with much of what Eric wrote here:

> In Mircea Eliade's research, the role of the schizophrenic is enabled > by some tribes and excluded by others. In complex social networks, > which we are a part of, the schizophrenic is excluded and sent to the > shadows.> As well capitalism has no room, or need for the schizophrenic. They > don't contribute to the nations wealth in an open market system. > Witness the homeless today and the Bedlams of the past. Providing a > social space doesn't cure the chemical imbalances, but it can give > them a nurturing environment and a sense of belonging.> It isn't a cure, but it does provide needed dignity.

Though I'd go a little further and say that ultimately it may not be correct to describe schizophrenia as a condition requiring a "cure" ... You could also remove the normative aspect from psychiatry altogether and simply that schizophrenia is a condition, a statistical outlier, but not necessarily more or less healthy, just different.

I don't want to trivialize or glamorize the problems faced by those with mental illnesses. In fact, my dad works in the industry, so I grew up with all sorts of terrible stories about mental illnesses.

But if you're not normal, and that makes it difficult to live in society, who's to blame for that, exactly? Homosexuality was only removed from the DSM within the last 50 years. If you grew up gay in a Christian fundamentalist household in a homophobic small town, and revealing your desires to anybody might get you condemned or beaten or killed, and then you grow up with serious intimacy issues, whose fault is that?

Or, to take a much more harrowing example from the cutting edge of psychiatric pathology: Some psychiatrists are beginning to look into what is currently called Body Integrity Identity Disorder, which is the overwhelming desire of a person to voluntarily amputate a very specific part of their body. These patients (who are almost always men) feel that a certain part of their body (almost always below the waist) simply doesn't belong to them, and that they would be more whole without it. Like pre-op transsexuals, they often dress the part, for example by tying their leg back and wearing loose fitting pants that are clipped up where the missing part would be.

And, although research on this is extremely preliminary, at this point it would appear that the only known treatment is actually amputation. Some of these patients are able to pursue this in a proper medical setting, but as you might imagine some are forced to do it themselves, using whatever tools you might imagine a person might use if they were forced to self-amputate without the benefit of a medical staff, an operating theatre, or anesthesia.

The New York Underground had a pretty amazing documentary on the subject (I think two years ago), and a few of the interviewees were people who had taken this step. They all looked astoundingly happy. Their condition was cured. They were just without one leg or foot or whatever ...

Now, this is pretty horrifying stuff, and it's clearly not normal in the statistical sense, but why is it unhealthy? We know, for example, that plenty of people who lose their limbs in accidents are capable of living rich, fulfilling lives. So why can't the same be true for somebody who loses his limb on purpose? And what should society's response be to this? Should we make it easier for people to get, to twist a Christian fundamentalist phrase, "amputation-on-demand"? Or should we force them to pursue years of experimental treatments--shock therapies, medication, aversion therapy, etc., etc.--in lieu of just getting an amputation, which is on its own a very established, safe medical procedure?

Anyway, back to schizophrenia ... It's quite possible that the world is going to become increasingly hostile to its schizophrenics, largely as a result of the spread of global capitalism. Cities are worse for schizophrenics than the countryside, so a future in which more than half the world's population is urban doesn't bode well for them. The complex web of invisible power relations--whether technical, financial, social, or legal--required to get along in the 21st century probably don't do any good for the schizophrenic's propensity for paranoia.

Maybe the trade-offs are worth it, maybe they're not. I personally can't claim to be pure in this respect, anyway: I live in a big city and I work with the internet and I even find the Economist to be interesting reading. But maybe it's a shame that we're implicitly deciding that from now on, society has no place for the schizophrenic. And maybe it's a copout to say that it's because of biology that they don't fit in, when it's just as much because of culture.

Or maybe the decision isn't so final. Maybe the fragmentation of culture that comes with the spread of information technology actually works against the idea of reality as consensus--and thus in favor of the schizophrenic. Any world that has a place for furries and centaur porn and Everquest economies and transgenderism and people who dress up like Uruk-Hai on the weekends might actually have a place for schizophrenics, right? Who's to say.

I’m looking for nine fiction writers who want to collaborate with me on an artwork that has been commissioned by Turbulence.org. I don’t want to give too much away, but I can say that the work will involve writing collaborative, improvisational fiction online. I can’t honestly say how good the final product will be, but I think it’ll make a fascinating experiment—provided, of course, I’m lucky enough to have good writers to work with.

Each writer will receive a $200 stipend for participation. Participating in this artwork will require a light, but ongoing commitment: perhaps an hour a week, from March to June.

No particular experience, or publications, are necessary. However, you should be mildly comfortable with technology, enough to use a website like MySpace or a blog host like Blogspot. It would also be okay if you had a friend who could help you with the technical stuff. Basically, the project involves a little tech setup, and I don’t want to have to do a lot of tech support for other people.

If that doesn’t sound too maddeningly vague, please let me know if you’re interested by emailing me at sera@fhwang.net. I’d appreciate a few writing samples, and if you have any experience with improvisational anything (stand-up comedy, music, even live-action role-playing), it’d be useful to know about that, too. Also, please feel free to ask any other questions. Thanks!